Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Afghan Detainee Abuse: On Their Watch, The Liberals Knew.

Just saying is all. This should not be taken as a disinclination to Iggy's Liberals or a political preference for any of the Liberals' adversaries or their recent antics about this "scandal." Just saying, is all. The Liberals knew.

The link to the article in La Presse, which was accessible on the website of the Centre d'études des politiques étrangères a only a few hours ago, is now redirecting to a "403 Forbidden" page. But it's still obtainable in Google's cache. One can only wonder whether Canada's English language newspapers have this article in their morgues. Did no Anglo journalist even bother trying to match this scoop? With due acknowledgment to the diligent work undertaken by the Torchists, who first noticed something amiss a month ago, here's the English translation:

April 28, 2007:

"Canadian diplomats stationed in Kabul warned the former Liberal government in 2003, 2004 and 2005 that torture was commonplace in Afghan prisons. In spite of these warnings, the Martin government signed an agreement with the Karzai government in December 2005 to hand over all Canadian-captured prisoners to Afghan authorities, Foreign Affairs documents obtained by La Presse reveal.

"From 2002 to 2005, the Canadian practice regarding Afghan detainees suspected of Taliban ties was to hand them over to US military authorities. Ottawa decided to shift its transfers to Afghan authorities, however, in response to abuse allegations at the Guantánamo Bay internment center and the controversy that erupted over revelations of torture and degradation at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"The December 2005 agreement to transfer detainees to Afghan authorities was concluded despite the content of annual reports from Canadian diplomats covering broad assessments of Afghanistan’s progress in human rights protection and the development of democratic institutions. According to a 2004 report: 'The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission concludes from its monitors’ assessments that torture remains a current practice, particularly during the early stages of police investigations, in order to extract confessions from prisoners.'

"While the Afghan government was not accused of condoning physical violence in the treatment of prisoners, a 2005 report filed by Canadian diplomats noted that the Afghan military, police and intelligence services were implicated in arbitrary arrests, kidnappings, extortion, torture, and the murder of criminal suspects. Police commanders and officers were also implicated in many allegations of rape. The alleged victims included women, girls and boys.

"While Liberal deputy leader John McCallum was defence minister in 2003, his colleague Bill Graham was foreign affairs minister. In an interview, Mr McCallum told La Presse had never seen the Foreign Affairs’ documents. Mr Graham took over as defence minister in June 2004 and still held the post when Canada signed the agreement in December 2005.

"An anonymous Liberal source, well acquainted with the situation, said the Martin government believed that the situation had improved in Afghan prisons when the agreement was concluded: 'From 2002 to 2005, we transferred our prisoners to the Americans. But that became politically untenable because of the stories about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These events, and our certainty that things had improved in the Afghan prison system, convinced us to sign the detainee transfer agreement with the Afghans,' the source explained.

"However, the Martin government had received annual reports that ill-treatment in Afghan prisoners was commonplace, and the reports closely compare with the report disclosed in a Toronto daily newspaper Wednesday that has caused such a stir in the House of Commons. That document shows that going back to 2006, torture has been a routine practice in Afghan prisons. Opposition parties cited these reports to accuse the Harper government of closing its eyes on violations of Afghan prisoners’ rights. The Globe and Mail also reported this week that about 30 Taliban prisoners say they were abused by local Afghan police after they were transferred by Canadian soldiers.

"The Harper government didn’t help its cause this week, making several contradictory statements about Afghan prisoners captured by Canadian soldiers and delivered to local authorities in the Kandahar area. Defence minister Gordon O'Connor was the source of the confusion and plunged the Conservatives into embarrassment. The minister initially said that the Independent Human Rights Commission monitors the condition of prisoners to ensure they are well treated, but the commission does not have the financial means nor the staff to undertake the task.

"Then, on Wednesday, Mr O'Connor said that Canada had concluded an agreement with authorities in Kandahar allowing Canadian soldiers a right of access to Afghan detainees to ensure they’re not being ill-treated. This was contradicted 24 hours later by prime minister Stephen Harper, who confirmed in the House of Commons on Thursday that no formal agreement exists to allow this access, but that the Canadian authorities hoped to conclude one soon.

"Then public safety minister Stockwell Day added to confusion when he said that for several weeks Corrections Canada staff had been afforded access to the Afghan prisons in the Kandahar area. Then Mr Day moderated his remarks by affirming that two Corrections Canada staff members had been sent to Afghanistan to advise local prison authorities, and then he he explained that their mandate had been broadened so that they could look into the the practice of torture in Afghan prisons."

There you have it.

No matter how laggardly and inattentive the Conservatives may have been in fixing up the whole mess, let it no longer be said that the Conservatives made it, at least not by themselves. The Conservatives inherited a slapdash and jerryrigged process from the Liberals, and if it was a mess it was because the Liberals made it, first. And they knew they were making a mess. And they did it anyway.

Just how it has come to pass that the Liberals have been able to make so much hay out of the "detainee abuse scandal" at the expense of their successors in the Conservative Party may prove to be one of those enduring mysteries of Ottawa politics. Or, in the alternative, some plucky reporter will strike out from the herd and resolve the mystery, at the expense of his colleagues' reputations.

Or not.

UPDATE: The audacity of Liberal finance critic John McCallum is a thing to behold. Note that the article in La Presse points out that Canadian diplomats in Kabul warned McCallum's former Liberal government in 2003, 2004 and 2005 that torture was commonplace in Afghan prisons, and in spite of these warnings the Liberals decided to start handing over all Canadian-captured prisoners to Afghan authorities anyway, in December, 2005. Note also: John McCallum was defence minister in 2003, and stayed on in cabinet, and in the 2007 La Presse interview he said he never saw the diplomats' warnings. And in spite of all that, this is what McCallum just finished telling the CBC: "I think proroguing adds to the total character picture of Mr. Harper, and the fact that they may have been committing war crimes, handing over detainees knowing that they were very likely to be tortured, that is a war crime. And the fact that they're covering it up. . ."

Hilarious update 2: "The real question is: Why didn't the Prime Minister bat this one out of the park? Why did he allow the prisoners controversy to simmer, until it inevitably boiled over? Was he playing for time? Did he think we could take prisoners without anyone finding out? Or did he hope, the state of the military being what it is, that our boys just wouldn't capture anybody? Such timidity is peculiar, not only coming from this Prime Minister, but over such a transparently phony issue." The particular transparently phony issue in question is from almost eight years ago. The writer was Andrew Coyne, the Prime Minister was Paul Martin. In other words, we'll get to the bottom of this yet, and when we do, don't be surprised if there is nothing there.

13 Comments:

Even with this particular revelation, this is nearly an impossible situation for Stephen Harper.

If we accept the argument that Canadian soldiers have been "complicit in war crimes", this has been the case not for merely four years, as the opposition parties would like to pretend, but in fact for at least a total of seven.

Harper could lay the complete record bare, and snare the Liberal Party in its own negligence and duplicity on this matter.

But there are activists within Canada who would likely demand that the Canadian soldiers who had handled these prisoners -- who were only using the resources they had at their disposal as best they could -- be tried for war crimes at the Hague.

So, Harper could benefit politically, and all he would have to do is fail to protect these soldiers to do it.

A fair point, Patrick, but premised on two assumptions that are less than solid.

The first is that Harper (or more precisely, the responsible ministers) has not laid "the complete record bare" to the extent he can with compromising operational security, without compromising the integrity of the International Red Cross, and without severely disturbing Ottawa's already frayed and difficult relationships with the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Maybe Harper has been too petulant by half, and maybe there is more that the Conservatives could entrust to the sobriety and discretion and good judgment and non-partisan sense of fair play and devotion to the public good that truly animates Ujjal Dosanjh and the Commons Committee on Afghanistan.

(Did you notice the implications in that last sentence? Good.)

But far more has been "laid bare" by the government, and the government has mounted far less in the way of obfuscation and non-cooperation and "cover-up", than most Canadians have been allowed to read in certain of their daily newspapers. A glimpse, without the filter of journalists instructing you in what you should regard as "explosive" or "incendiary" testimony or "bombshell" evidence, is here, in the televised committee hearings:

The second slightly dodgy premise is, as you describe it, "If we accept the argument that Canadian soldiers have been 'complicit in war crimes'. We should not accept this, owing to one so-far unimpeachable reason: There is no evidence, after years of inordinate scrutiny, and indeed all the evidence is in fact to the contrary.

Remember, the government's critics have conflated 1) a general and undisputed understanding backed by numerous bodies of evidence that there has been a risk of torture facing anyone who ends up in the crowbar hotel, anywhere in Afghanistan, for some long while, with 2) a specific knowledge, based even on "circumstantial evidence," that specific detainees apprehended specifically by Canadian soldiers and turned over to Afghan authorities were tortured.

The government side has never denied being possessed of the knowledge of (1), despite all the shouts and insinuations coming from the Liberal quarter. The government has acknowledged (and acted upon) this evidence from the get-go, less assiduously than it should have, one can easily argue, but still.

The government has indeed denied having been in possession of (2), and this is a perfectly plausible denial, since the only evidence inveighing against the denial was that guy who got his ears boxed a by a couple of Afghan hard boys in uniform before being rescued immediately by the Canucks who had detained and transferred him (this is the "smoking gun" substance of the Natynczyk "flip flop" we are all supposed to be cite with slogans on our placards as we march on Parliament with torches).

It might have been reasonable to conflate the two while the Liberals were in power, owing to the shabbiness of the agreement they signed, but let's give the Liberals the benefit of the doubt, and not do this. For fairness and argument's sake, at the very least.

The fact nonetheless remains that the Liberals cannot have it both ways now. The Liberals and their supporting phalanx of critics cannot claim that the Conservatives are doing or have done anything less assiduously, less responsibly, less attentively as regards international human rights norms, than the Liberals themselves did when it was their show.

But that is precisely what the Liberals have been allowed to get away with. They have been allowed to conflate the "evidence" in order to accuse the Conservatives of doing precisely what they themselves did - and you don't have to conflate or misrepresent anything to hold the Liberals at fault for having done it, because the evidence against them is plain and simple.

They were warned by their own diplomats for four years running that any suspected Taliban handed over to the Afghan authorities was likely to be subjected to the rack and the thumb screws. The Liberals decided to hand over the (alleged) Taliban detainees anyway, and worse, they handed them over according to the terms of a transfer agreement that failed to contain any meaningful safeguards whatsoever, if you don't mind.

Say these things out loud, though, and you will have people screaming in your face that you're a warmongering Conservative Party shill, or that you've unpardonably dishonoured the speckless reputation of that brave and public-spirited "senior diplomat" Richard Colvin. The mood in the country at the moment is such that you'd be better off waving a Celtics flag in the middle of a seething crowd of skinheads from a Glasgow Rangers fan club.

Far more disturbing is the matter of the alleged or possible culpability of our soldiers, and on that point you are much closer to a truly "incendiary" discovery than you might realize.

It is wholly disingenuous for the Liberals (and their friends in the punditocracy) to plead 'No! We're not saying the soldiers are war criminals! We're saying Conservative politicians are!' or some other version of that plaintive cry.

If the Conservatives are guilty of war crimes in their handling of the detainee file (and yes, no matter how silly that sounds, this proposition is now a central part of the "political debate" in this country), then the only defence the Liberals and their supporters are allowing our soldiers is: "I was only following orders."

And as any fool knows, that is not an allowable defence against the charge of war crimes.

That is why any bleater who indignantly protests that he is not casting a stain upon the escutcheon of our soldiers (while wiping a tear from his eye with his hankie) is either a fool or a liar. But fools and liars often get away with their larks, and it's all been wonderfully entertaining.

It's also been the most cunning work-avoidance racket going on in Ottawa for quite some time. It's been even more useful to the slackers than Harper's recent proroguery.

Thanks milnews, but now the .pdf of the La Presse story doesn't seem to be opening.

Brooktrout: What good can come of this? My only hope is that the politicians on the Commons Committee onn Afghanistan, and one would hope, eventually the House of Commons itself, would return to the work it is supposed to be doing, which every other member of the 42-country ISAF coalition is busy with at the moment: Constructing a proper successor to the 66-nation Afghanistan Compact, which expires in 2011.

My intention with this is to point out that the scandal mongering is all very entertaining, but the scandal mongers themselves were in fact guilty of doing exactly what they are accusing the Conservatives of doing, only worse: As the La Presse account makes painfully clear, the Liberals knew about torture and did nothing, they were warned about torture and they decided to start transferring Taliban detainees to Afghan prisons anyway. And this, according to no less a personage than the former Liberal defence minister John McCallum himself, is a "war crime."

Remember, this is what McCallum said today, about his Conservative successors: "handing over detainees knowing that they were very likely to be tortured, that is a war crime."

That's not me convicting the Liberals of war crimes. That's McCallum convicting the Liberals of war crimes.

Does one appear "partisan" just by noticing this?

To hell with that. Unlike, say, Michael Byers, the NDP convert and star candidate who almost single-handedly started all this three years ago, I have never once voted Conservative in my life.

But that should not matter, anyway. You know who looks really partisan in this? People who cry "partisan" when one merely points these things out, and people for whom it's only a "war crime" when the Conservatives do it.

Terry, this would make a great response in QP. And therein lies the problem, because I know you're not a conservative. The "scandal mongers" are also bureaucrats and citizens and reporters, etc.... They are going to discuss this issue and subject it to a full airing one way or another--in committee hearings, on the airwaves, on the floor of the HoC, assuming it ever gets back to work--whether some people find it offensive to the apparently delicate feelings of the front-line soldiers and workers or not.

Sorry for taking so long for getting back to you. I got caught up in the Olympic Torch Run festivities here in Edmonton, and have been working on a few projects.

I promised you I'd respond to your comments, so here goes:

"The first is that Harper (or more precisely, the responsible ministers) has not laid 'the complete record bare' to the extent he can with compromising operational security, without compromising the integrity of the International Red Cross, and without severely disturbing Ottawa's already frayed and difficult relationships with the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan."

I can understand this. On one point -- that of operational security -- I would need a good explanation for precisely how this affects operational security.

On the second point, I'd have to tell you I consider this to be a non-starter. Given the choice between defending the integrity of our government and our service men and women or maintaining a relationship with the government of Afghanistan, the former is the one and only priority.

The latter doesn't even come close, when compared to the importance of the former.

"Maybe Harper has been too petulant by half, and maybe there is more that the Conservatives could entrust to the sobriety and discretion and good judgment and non-partisan sense of fair play and devotion to the public good that truly animates Ujjal Dosanjh and the Commons Committee on Afghanistan."

I agree. Dosanjh and his Liberal colleagues have been entirely duplicitous on this regard, and we need to make sure we are doing everything we can to bring this to the attention of as many Canadians as possible.

(Admittedly, you've done a much better job of this than I have. But, then again, you have a much better pulpit than I.)

"But far more has been 'laid bare' by the government, and the government has mounted far less in the way of obfuscation and non-cooperation and 'cover-up', than most Canadians have been allowed to read in certain of their daily newspapers. A glimpse, without the filter of journalists instructing you in what you should regard as 'explosive' or 'incendiary' testimony or 'bombshell' evidence, is here, in the televised committee hearings"

"On one point -- that of operational security -- I would need a good explanation for precisely how this affects operational security."

What is required, at least in my humble opinion, is an exhaustive and forensic reconstruction of the chain of decision-making and actions and follow-ups on the detainee file, from day one to the present day. I expect a judicial review would be best, for now. For a complete review, much of the evidence would necessarily be held in-camera. That is because you would have to get into specific details regarding precise locations of apprehensions, detentions, and so on, how information was obtained and from whom, and a variety of types of information that could seriously compromise operational security - the safety of our soldiers and of their friends and sources in the field.

"Given the choice between defending the integrity of our government and our service men and women or maintaining a relationship with the government of Afghanistan, the former is the one and only priority."

Wrong, in this way: If we are forced to make a choice, it means something's gone wrong. I'm not setting up these constraints in a rigid order of priority, but if you want to put the two together as you have, for purposes of comparison, then don't forget that diplomatic imperatives can directly affect the security of our soldiers. That is how wars between states happen, let's not forget.

There may be an elegant solution. If we required of the members of our Commons committee on Afghanistan the same oaths that govern business related to "state secrets" and "diplomatic secrecy" as prevail in other Parliamentary democracies and in the U.S., the media would be curtailed somewhat in the short term, but the committee would not be a circus (which is the function it has come to serve on the detainee issue, sadly), and its members might have to actually work for a living.

In the hubbub over the detainees and Harper's proroguery, it's become rote now to cavil on and on about how it's the Opposition's job to hold the government accountable. This is actually rubbish. The job of the people we elect to govern, whether they end up on the "government" or the Opposition benches, is a bit more important than that. "Holding the government accountable" is your job, and mine, and the press gallery's, and the courts', and everyone's, including the protesters with signs around their necks sitting cross-legged day after day on the Parliament lawns.

The job of our MPs is to govern. That's why it's called "government."

I'm not prepared to let Opposition MPs off the hook with their sniveling about having been prorogued. They haven't been doing their jobs on the Afghanistan file (see my post today), they weren't doing their jobs before they got prorogued, and they can't use prorogation as an excuse to explain why they aren't doing their jobs now.